May 15, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    A relief model of landscape sits on a large table. From my side of the table, I see bare hills on one side, a wood lot on the other, and a stream, bordered by farms, in the middle. In my mind's eye, I see what this landscape might be like if I were a bird and, with some effort, even how it might appear from a point in outer space: in other words, I can see it as a map. A discovery of mental-map geographers of the 1960s is that even young children aged 7 to 8—children who have never been on an airplane and who, therefore, never saw a landscape from the air—can envisage landscape as a map. We humans apparently have a built-in capacity to see reality from "nowhere," abstractly and impersonally. But, like all human capacities, this capacity will remain dormant unless it is exercised. Another remarkable finding is that whereas we can see from a local point and "see" from "nowhere," we have the devil of a time seeing from someone else's position--say the guy at the opposite end of the table.

    Now, it occurs to me that this provides a neat way of showing how pedagogic culture and values have changed since the 1970s, a change promoted by the noble desire to admit as many challenged minorities as possible into the universities. Until the 1970s, it was taken completely for granted that students come to college so that their narrow point of view from "somewhere" (say, Podunk, Illinois) can become a more generalized and abstract view from "above." It is also taken for granted that both losses and gains occur in the move, the loss being the warm tactilities and comforting smells of home and the gain being the cool and bracing air of the large world.

    Administrators and faculty, fearful that minority students might not be able to make the transition, offer two solutions. One is to make the university as home-like as possible by creating cozy ethnic enclaves (programs that promote self-esteem). The other is a remarkable example of self-flagellation, downgrading the best that the university has to offer—this objective, God-like view from "nowhere"—to a point of view, one just like any other and, in fact worse than any grounded other, for it is cold, impersonal, and suitable only for the exercising of power. In our post-modernist world, one in which administrators and many faculty members are strangely at ease, students are taught to believe that there are only particular views and that therefore their view—how they see the hills and valleys from where they stand--is as good as any other.

    This attitude is undoubtedly reassuring to minority students: they don't have to submit to the rigors of calculus, after all. But the attitude is equally reassuring to lazy mainline students, who can retain their own prejudices and feel, at the same time, self-righteous and egalitarian by allying them with the narrow, though different, prejudices of students of color.

    Now, what ought the university offer? How should it challenge students? My ideal is an impossible dream, for I believe that the university should not only challenge students to rise from the local to the universal, which, after all, is an innate human capacity, but also attempt to descend again to the particulars, learn how players "on the other sides of the table" evaluate their worlds, and then make a superhuman effort to enfold the particulars in the general, for it is only so that we can acquire an approximate understanding of human reality.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu